Posted
by
Soulskill
on Friday September 21, 2012 @01:39PM
from the don't-take-candy-from-strangers dept.

SquarePixel writes "Bloomberg has an interesting story about Microsoft's efforts to simultaneously woo younger workers and to get more apps into its Windows Store. Quoting: 'Microsoft, the world's largest software maker, designed Windows 8 for touch-screen technology included in the company's first tablet, Surface, and other devices coming this year. To gain share in tablets, a market expected by DisplaySearch to reach $66.4 billion in 2012, Microsoft needs enough apps to challenge the more than 200,000 available for iPad. Using student recruits is one way Microsoft can woo app developers who are used to building programs for mobile phones and tablets, where the company has little and no share, respectively. Luring programmers before graduation is particularly critical for recruitment in the U.S., which lags behind countries such as India and China in its ability to crank out qualified engineers.'"

Yeah, because anyone who who would dare offer a comment in defense of Microsoft could only be a paid shill!

His comment looks legit to me. He's right that there shouldn't be any expectation of app compatibility between WP7 and WP8 -- they're two completely different animals. Just like you shouldn't expect BB7 apps to run under BB10. This is not new in the mobile space.

h4rr4r may be naive, I don't know, but you're very clearly a conspiracy nut!

Strange how an article about Microsoft wooing college kids fails to mention technet and dreamspark. VS 2012 and Windows 8 are now on dreamspark for students. Making this stuff available for free is a big boost over Apple, where I have to purchase at least a $500 mac mini to gain access to iOS development tools.

I'm the college kid, with the macbook pro, in the computer science class.

Surprisingly macbooks are becoming more popular yet our teachers still insist on using MS products and languages. I know in the *real* world there are a lot of MS jobs etc, but there are also a lot of cross platform jobs too (i'm a php developer, dont judge). Drives me nuts when I have to spin up a VM just to use a program thats Windows specific because the requirements for the project/program/lesson are for a windo

What school do was that? I ran Linux the entire time through college (Penn State -- comp sci as well) and never needed a Windows tool. We did have a couple classes that required you to do your work on Unix though (Well, you could do the work anywhere, but it would be tested and graded on a Unix system -- and it's kinda hard to test a shell script on Windows...) but of course Linux worked just fine too. Most of the higher level classes used some GNU tools (gdb was pretty much essential for the security class

At my university we keep stats on what students are connecting to our network. As far as wireless connections go trend is now 60% macs to windows laptops. Disclaimer (It's a private institution so that could explain some of the higher apple product numbers)

Sorry, I didn't realize Mac Minis start at $599, not $500. Desktop PCs start at about $300, with some respectable specs these days (dual core 2.7 Ghz, 4GB RAM is enough for an entry level development machine), and I can build one myself for even cheaper. Can't build a Mac... I guess I could build a hackintosh though, although from my experience with those a couple years ago I wouldn't do it again: many incompatibility issues and eventually completely unusable for iOS development after about a year due to re

Welcome to programming? Lets you see develop windows applications without buying a 400$+ windows PC, or even Linux applications without a machine that runs Linux. If you buy a mac, all the programming tools are free, all the documentation is free, and you don't even need to show student ID.

96% of incoming students have their own computer (at least at my past unis). Yes, disproportionately many have a Mac compared to the general population, but they are usually in the arts and humanities. In computer science (again at the 4 unis I've attended) the vast majority have PCs (as opposed to Macs), and the software the university requires for technical majors (engineering, comp sci) is only provided for Windows. The students most likely to develop for these platforms are those in comp sci and technic

What University do you go to? CS at my Uni is 80% Macs, 10% Linux machines (disproportionately Ubuntu, for better or for worse), 5% Windows machines, and the rest never bring laptops (and borrow a mac from the Uni to do work on).

Again, all of our software is either on a central server that can be SSH'd to with X access (and thus any machine can be used to get to it), it's cross platform, or it's OS/X or Linux. I can only think of maybe one specific class that you *must* have a windows machine for (and it's like a C# class or something) and even then, I think they meet in a computer lab of Windows machines.

Any mac can be setup for development trivially quickly and easily. I'm not at all a mac fanboy (quite the opposite) but Apple did figure out how to treat their developers well. It wouldn't surprise me if a great amount of Universities are pretty Windows leaning, but it's not the de facto standard by any shot. OS X has a good hold on the Universities (and most programmers) and I strongly suspect it will continue grow. (Personally, they can have my Arch laptop when they can pry it out of my cold dead hands).

the software the university requires for technical majors (engineering, comp sci) is only provided for Windows.

What university was that? Just graduated from Penn State's comp sci program, and we were _never_ required to use Windows software. There were a few classes where we were required to write everything for Unix though. My laptop ran Linux at the time and that never caused an issue. All of the courses that did anything operating system specific would be focused on Unix, and maybe compare to Mac or Windows as a side note.

So, instead you have to spend $500 for a cheap PC to build windows apps on? Windows doesn't offer Visual Studio on the Mac just like Apple doesn't offer XCode on Windows. XCode is a free download btw.
Having said that, I've programmed on both environments and this is what I've found:
1. Programming for C# has been a joy. It's easy to go from C,C++ or Java and pick up on what's different. The additional features make sense and are simple to use and well documented. Programming for ObjC has been really ugly-

Xcode is free and I would also have to purchase a PC to run Visual Studio unless MS has released VS for Mac.

This fallacy has been repeated several times and so far everyone has not noticed...

The difference is that Windows runs on Macintosh computers, therefore Visual Studio runs on Macintosh computers. OSX does not run on PC's, unless someone has developed a VM recently that tricks OSX... which is doubtful, would still be a crappy VM unlike vise-versa, and such a VM would be quickly blocked by Apple perhaps even with the FBI knocking down the VM developers door because Apple pulls that shit.

When I look back at the code I created in college, compared to what I was capable of after a few years of real world development experience... The difference is pretty stark. I understand the get-em-while-they're-young approach, to influence development decisions later in life. But if they're betting the success of their platform on the output of students with limited-to-no real world experience, I fear for the quality of the apps in their store.

In college maybe 80% of the time was spent writing code and 20% in design, testing, fixing bugs, archiving, documentation and sales. In the real world this ratio is reversed. Especially when you count team members whose main duties are non-coding.

When I look back at the code I created in college, compared to what I was capable of after a few years of real world development experience... The difference is pretty stark. I understand the get-em-while-they're-young approach, to influence development decisions later in life. But if they're betting the success of their platform on the output of students with limited-to-no real world experience, I fear for the quality of the apps in their store.

Good point. Apple's AppStore generally has very good quality apps. The Google's PlayStore/Android MarketPlace has not; thus if you want to stand out on Android you really have to make a quality app - especially if you want to be paid for it. The same will be true for Microsoft's App Store (whatever they call it). Just stuffing it with apps won't make any difference.

Literally all of the apps in the windows 8 store suck terribly. I've tried a good portion of them. I don't see how wooing 200k apps out of people who've never built something significant is going to change this fact. I think this is a way of desensitizing future developers with respect to a walled garden app store and closed platform with proprietary tools. nothing good can come of this. For ref i sit in front of visual studio for 5 hours a day at the moment so I'm not some crazy zealot. Crazy perhaps.

But now, like the Apple store, the MS Windows store will have 50,000 fart apps, 50,000 track your drinking app, 50,000 rate-your-hooks-up and 50,000 top-pick-up-lines-for-geeks. Right there MS will match the number of apps in the Apple store.

What I notice about the Apps in the store over the past year is the barrier to entry is much greater, not because there are more apps, but because the quality has increased substantially. This is no longer a numbers game. Apple has never been about numbers. Apple n

I saw Microsoft do it in 2001 with.NET, now they attempt to do it again. It's not a shortage of languages or toolkits. This is about platform lock-in as always. I can understand if PC programming (native apps) and Web apps don't get unified to the vastly different architectures (monolithic PC vs Client/server) , but in this day and age, what is going on?

Why can't I just import the Win8 libraries into Python? Or Java, or.NET (C#)? Or Qt's QML? HTML5 is not a save-all, and I'm ok with that, but why won't we make it easier on each other and admit the emperor is just wearing different clothes. Why for that matter won't WP7 apps run on WP8?

There was a time when MS has tweaks for every program and backwards compatibly was preserved, but those days are long gone. To keep their market share, they have to keep everyone upgrading into the Microsoft corner, fracturing the market place, which sets us back.

Why can't I just import the Win8 libraries into Python? Or Java, or.NET (C#)? HTML5 is not a save-all

Technically, since Win8 libraries - if you mean Windows Runtime (WinRT) - have a well-defined ABI, it's certainly possible to project them to Java or Python. They are already projected to C# and C++, you're not restricted to HTML5/JS (for some reason it seems to be an oft-recurring misunderstanding that you can only write Win8 apps in that - it's completely wrong).

As for Qt, it's a library that does its own widgets down to drawing and input handling. If they want to port it to Win8, they can.

Ok, I was a bit incorrect on that statement. It seems that the issue is the nascent WP7 base who can't run WP8 apps, meaning that just a few months after Nokia brought he phones to market developers don't have much incentive to make WP7 apps. Which is just horrible timing.

How much of Apple's App Store success is brought about by the development tools and niceness of Object-oriented programming / interface design?

I'm biased, since for a long while a NeXT Cube was my primary machine (and for a while, I had access to machines running Windows, Mac OS and NeXTstep all w/ similar processor and memory specs), but some of the nicest applications I've ever used began on NeXTstep, and pretty much all the apps I have a real fondness for were heavily influenced by OO-environments (FutureWave Smartsketch which became Flash, but started on Go Corp.'s PenPoint):

Like you, the NeXTs introduced me to OOP and OOD. It was a whole new way of coding and allowed me to produce finished and polished apps in record time back then. The resultant code may only have run on NeXTs but that wasn't really the point at the time. I've not used a dev system since which had the ease of use or rapid development cycle.

These days the code I write is generally more portable, more efficient and the source is more maintainable. But it takes a lot longer to produce (even with all the framewor

If you read the Microsoft metro app store policy you will start laughing, especially at "3.2 Your app must not stop responding, end unexpectedly, or contain programming errors", I mean look who's freaking talking here. Windows 1 to Windows 7, office 1 to office 2010, all had and have freaking issues(freezing, crashes, bugs, glitches) xbox 360 hardware failure, and yet they got the balls to tell you not to fuck it up. Shit, how many freaking times my windows 7 kept freezing because i did not set the storage(both winodws & amd SB drivers sucked) configuration from ide compatibility to ahci in the bios while the linux distros had no issues with this.

Microsoft also has the right to cancel your account and wipe all your apps off from the store any time if they think you are not conforming to their policy. For students, learning c & c++ would make it easier for them to adapt other languages much quicker. Writing efficient and inventive Algorithm's is the most important aspect of any programming language.

While running Windows software updates and program installs on the 6 dozen iMacs in my University's labs, one in five would blue-screen during the 5 hour upgrade process after imaging. This was Windows 7, and it was this year. Admittedly, the blue-screen rate is better on Win7, but I wouldn't call 1 in 5 to be non-existent nor would I dismiss others' reports just because you've had good luck with your hardware and drivers.

If the hardware is the same they should all crash at the same point if you are using the same image. You must have had a lot with a defective ram unit. You should ram test them. But before take a look at the error codes at the bottom of the screen and look it up. A blue screen is abnormal, I only saw two, one cause by the stupid antivirus and one caused by an hd crash. By the way, we recently ban the purchase of Apple product using university money due to a recent drop in reliability.

When I saw that in US universities, students are actually taught to use Windows, Visual Studio, and to program in C#, I was shocked at how influential Microsoft was in the US, and how bad the situation was.Doing this is a terrible idea, reliance on a IDE means they don't understand how the compilation tool chain works, and they get stuck using this sub-par software, which, to top things off, is also proprietary and restricted to Microsoft platforms.

No wonder Inda and China are better, American students are not taught software engineering, they're taught how to be code monkeys.

Well, back in *my* day, we didn't have any of those fancy, dancy Eye Dee Eees. We soldered together wires to our vacuum tubes from instructions sets carved in clay tablets. That's the way is was and we *liked* it!

Why did someone mark the AC flamebait? Did anybody click on the guy's user ID? Personally I hate how the word shill is just thrown at frankly everyone that doesn't drink the koolaid around here but...damn, just damn. Every single post the guy has made has been pumping Visual Studio, Silverlight, and Windows mobile. It reads like somebody working at an Indian support center just going off one of those scripts.

And if anybody at MSFT is reading this? Dude quit with the fucking scripts already, nobody IRL talks

Why did someone mark the AC flamebait? Did anybody click on the guy's user ID? Personally I hate how the word shill is just thrown at frankly everyone that doesn't drink the koolaid around here but...damn, just damn. Every single post the guy has made has been pumping Visual Studio, Silverlight, and Windows mobile. It reads like somebody working at an Indian support center just going off one of those scripts.

Because it's NOT a shill, it's the newest FRIST POST troll. It's as predictable as a GNAA post on anything having to do with genetics, and occurs with much more repeatability compared to army of Michael Knoppel ids (forgot how to spell it) and his "you're completely pathetic" routine.

These particular trolls, when they appear for anything MS, are really fucking effective, though. Everyone gets riled up for it. Including myself at one point.

But it don't really smell like a troll, at least not to me, just bad marketing. A good troll would also put down a brand that would get the fanboys royally pissed, point out something nasty Google or Apple has done and WHAM! You've got epic 200 post troll bait right there.

But these? How do I describe it so you'll understand...oh I know...you ever call HP consumer division for tech support? They hire these Indian guys that read scripts to plug whatever product they want to shill this week, be it HP printers

The product is free and lacks a lot of very useful/needed things for a full-fledged development environment. Here's the list:

* No profiler support* No 64-bit compiler (32-bit only)* No resource editor (important for GUI-based bits)* No MFC support (some may consider this a good thing, but MFC is still in use today, like it or not)* No ATL support (less of a concern)

To me, the first 3 are absolute deal-breakers. So effectively what Microsoft has given the world for free is something that barely gets the job done -- and given that model, I would say it would definitely appeal to the same demographic they're advertising Windows 8 development to: college students.

So effectively what Microsoft has given the world for free is something that barely gets the job done -- and given that model, I would say it would definitely appeal to the same demographic they're advertising Windows 8 development to: college students.

As a college student I take great offense at the thought that pile of kludge is aimed at me. I have only met one person (in meatspace, all others I view with suspicion that it might be Balmer just trolling forums) that tried the windows 8 prerelease and liked it. (before that i thought he was a bit odd anyway but that just cemented it.)

Porting VS to x64 would be a considerable undertaking due to the nature of the product. UI stuff is easy, but low-level things like e.g. invasive debugging are very much non-trivial because they by their very nature are tightly coupled to the architecture. So ask yourself: would you rather have people spend time doing such a port just for the sake of having it, or adding new features and fixing numerous existing bugs?

I've got the carboard box an AMD64 CPU and motherboard bundle came in, and it has the year 2003 printed on it in large letters. That's for a desktop system, not a server and not an expensive high end workstation. How fucking long do MS need?

I seem to recall something about memory:)In other words the entire reason things started moving to 64 bit! Especially because of Microsoft's very limited support for the Pentium Pro and later with PAE, so 64 bit is the only way they properly support getting the use out of that memory.The platform they use has had 64 bit for over a decade so what's their problem?

Yes, a 64-bit process can use more memory. But why would you want your IDE to do so?

(Coincidentally, the other way of using all that RAM is running more things out-of-process, Unix-style. Which VS actually does more over time. Note that compilers, for example, run in separate processes.)

And yet.. for years now (Y-E-A-R-S!)I have comfortably developed 64-bit code in Linux. With a 64-bit toolchain including compiler, debugger, all that good stuff. On a 64-bit kernel. With the full array of drivers, programs, modules, and other software available that were available under 32-bit.

Why, exactly, do you care if the IDE or the compiler themselves are 64-bit? If they were, what difference would it make to you?

Note that VS can be used to develop 64-bit code - it's a fully supported scenario. And it will run on a 64-bit Windows with a 64-bit kernel.

I do belive that a huge percentage of new hardware is amd64, and the OS they include is amd64. Wouldn't that mean that youneed to bring all your dependencies in 32bit form, making your package huge and, honestly, very poor quality?

64-bit Windows runs 32-bit binaries just fine, it always did. Works much the same as Linux does in that regard - the OS provides both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of all system libraries.

You do need to package any dependencies with your app if you rely on anything other than what the OS provides - this is the case regardless of the architecture. For Intel you only need to package 32-bit to work on both x86 and on x64, though. And 32-bit binaries will generally be smaller.

It should be noted that students have access to the full Visual Studio suite, alongside the Expression suite and Windows Server (I think it goes back to 2003 up to 2012) through DreamSpark [dreamspark.com]. I've used it in the past and I have to say this is one of the nice things Microsoft does in comparison to, say, Adobe. Autodesk also provides free educational software, but theirs is branded as such whereas Microsoft's stuff seems like the full Professional versions with no strings attached.

When I was 13/14 and used win9x and wanted to learn to program, there was no visual studio express at all. Only paid tools costing hundreds of dollars.

So you know what I did?

Switched to Linux.

Even today, I have no idea how to write a Windows program (managed to write a DLL I needed a few years ago though.. using Visual studio express C++).. but I've been writing Linux/BSD software in C for 15 years.

Point is, Visual Studio express may be crap.. but if they had it 15 years ago.. I'm sure I would have learned to program in Windows instead. Might never have switched to Linux at all.

So IMO, it's a smart/critical piece of software from MS. It's a bit much to expect people who are learning to program to immediately spend hundreds of dollars.

Yes. Website, singular. It's the only major site I'm aware of that uses it, which is a really really bad sign for Silverlight. And it only really worked for Netflix (IMO) because there wasn't a lot of serious competition in that field (unlimited streaming in addition to DVD rentals, although those are now split, they weren't at the time), so people could complain, but not really chose another option.

Have you read MSDN documentation lately? How anyone can cram so much information on a page while answering nothing but the most obvious questions... Yes, it is WAY better than what we had in say the 80s with basica for 'free' or C/Assembler for an arm AND a leg and what is documentation? But I'll take a google search about an OSS friendly language any day over the MSDN docs. Granted, there is a lot of RTFM replies, asking questions in the wrong place, re-asking way too common questions, spam and etc... cr

I find that hard to believe since the MSDN website has been around for some 15+ years now and it's as bad as it ever was. I had the unfortunate luck to have to work on an Excel VBA project last year (I've since left the job... I got tired of living in the 80s) and when I would try to Google something related to VBA programming a Microsoft site was rarely in the first couple pages of results. I mean, VBA isn't worth the disk space it takes up (although if it actually worked, it wouldn't be too bad for very

I haven't noticed before, but MS offers free Visual Studio Express nowadays.. And Visual Studio coupled with XNA sure sounds better than how we had it back in the day. And with MSDN docs available and the whole internet to look and ask help from, it sure must be nice to be a kid learning programming in todays world.

They've had Visual Studio Express for a few years now. I think VS2005 or VS 2008 first had it - namely to try to keep people from moving to the GCC Suite on Windows I think. It's okay - the compiler can technically do anything the professional version can; but they set some arbitrary rules within the IDE itself to keep from making certain things - like plug-ins for VS, SCC providers, etc.

VS 2005 was the first version to offer Express. Originally the free part was supposed to be a temporary arrangement - the download page said something like "free during the initial period" or some such. But then it just went free.

The main limitation of Express is that it can't install non-MS plugins, so you effectively can't extend it - what's in the box is what you get. In terms of features, though, it has been mostly gaining them since release - e.g. in VS 2012 it's got unit test support (finally!) and TF